


Screw the Johnsons, this is way more interesting.

by bonyenne



Series: MCU Soulmate Standalones [3]
Category: Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Background Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson - Freeform, F/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 09:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14734601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonyenne/pseuds/bonyenne
Summary: Jessica never planned to actually find her soulmate, especially not right after getting her shit back together with Alias Investigations.Really, it's Alisa's fault for convincing her that it might be okay to become a hero.





	1. Chapter 1

  **Jessica Jones**

 

Why a married woman cares if the man she’s cheating with is cheating on her is a uniquely upper-class mystery Jessica doesn’t care to solve. Especially if it means she gets easy money for sitting in cafes people-watching in broad daylight. Not that she minds lounging on fire escapes in the dark either, but it’s a nice change of pace.

Mrs. Johnson’s boyfriend laughs and scoots his chair closer to the other woman, laying one hand on her arm and snagging her drink with the other. Jessica snaps a few pictures on her cell phone and idly eats a handful of fries, watching as a scruffy, possibly homeless man chickens out on crossing the Manhattan bridge for a third time.

—

Not Mr. Johnson has a meeting through lunch today, but Mrs. Johnson doesn’t know that, so Jessica hits up his usual lunch spot for a bit of prep work on the Johnson dime.

The guy is back, and in the same clothes as yesterday, so yeah, probably homeless. He actually does look like a relatively normal member of the crowd, except for the part where he isn’t begging for money or handing out pamphlets and never actually goes anywhere, no matter how hard he tries. He’s visibly agitated though, and she isn’t in the mood to organize the Johnson Saga documents and pictures, so she arranges her setup to make it look like she’s working and settles in to watch whatever shit’s about to go down.

Nothing much happens.

Ugh.

She sighs and starts sorting through the photos on her laptop. The woman Not Mr. Johnson is two-timing Mrs. Johnson with is possibly also two-timing Not Mr. Johnson and Jessica is _praying_ that it’s with Mr. Johnson because how screwed up would that be? She’s considering following Mr. Johnson and Not Mrs. Johnson just for fun (really? This is her idea of fun nowadays?) when movement at the edge of the patio catches her eye.

Probably Homeless Guy is right there, clutching the wrought iron rail for dear life and shaking like a leaf. His breaths are quick and he looks like he’d fall over if not for the fence holding him up.

Shit, anxiety attack.

Sucks to be him.

A sour taste hits the back of Jessica’s throat and her heart starts thudding in her ears as her mind begins involuntarily recalling street names, but she can’t look away. She wrenches her mind away from its spiral and forces herself to think about something else. What the fuck is so important in Brooklyn that he would keep trying to get over there? Also, if he can’t make himself walk there, why doesn’t he just try taking a taxi or something? Idiot. He’s roughly shaking his head now, and she’s pretty sure she sees tears in his eyes, but he seems to be getting himself under control. Eventually he pushes away from the fence and stalks off in the opposite direction from the bridge.

She briefly debates following him but there’s a three-quarters full plate in front of her and she’s not willing to let free food go to waste, so he passes from sight yet again. She sighs and spins her straw around her fingers, ignoring the exclamations as it splatters the table next to her. Guess it’s time to get back to the sex pics.

Yay.

She spends about an hour organizing the photos and planning out her schedule until the girl who’s been giving off stronger and stronger negative vibes finally comes up to the table and addresses her directly.

“Ma’am? We’re getting a little crowded… if you’re not going to buy anything more to eat can you please vacate the table?”

Jessica raises an eyebrow and looks around at the patio. Of the seven other tables on the patio, two are occupied by locals and a third is pseudo-occupied by a tourist family, who are really just standing around taking pictures of the patterns in the fence. One of the locals is a middle aged lady who’s sitting directly behind her and pointedly watching Jessica’s exchange with the server. The server herself is steadfastly avoiding looking at either the nosy baby boomer or the voyeuristic pictures filling the laptop screen. Jessica rolls her eyes and slams the screen shut, tossing a couple dollars on the table and grabbing her satchel.

“Whatever.”

She glances over at the fence as she passes the tourist family and pauses.

There’s a perfect imprint of a left hand molded into the rail.

—

Jessica really needs some night-vision binoculars if she’s going to keep following this guy. It’s too dark for regular binoculars, but they’d be so much easier than the camera considering she’s not planning on taking pictures. Except there’s no way she’ll buy good binoculars unless a client needs it so much that she can get them to pay for it, and her only client right now is Mrs. Johnson, so no. She watches from the shadows as he tries, yet again, to blend in as he suddenly veers away from the bridge. He’s definitely trained at _some_ sort of blending in but his agitation is opening him up to mistakes. Mistakes like leaving his sleeve alone for a good twenty seconds when it rides up to show a flash of metal above his glove that’s definitely not a watch. Mistakes like not spotting Jessica perched on a balcony right across the street.

Mistakes like overlooking the so-called tourist trailing him at street-level.

She narrows her eyes and considers the tourist.

First of all, he’s obviously not a tourist. He may be dressed like one, but his movements are too deliberately calculated to look like a tourist to the casual eye and yet missing any of the underlying emotions that tourists always come with. Every tourist has some hint of excitement, exhaustion, confusion, or over-stimulation, if not a weird mix of all four. It’s a fact.

He’s definitely not comfortable or natural enough in this environment to be a local either though, so it was probably smart to go the ‘tourist’ route. He’s tense, on edge.

Also, he’s carrying a gun.

A firetruck and an ambulance come whipping round the bend and suddenly they’ve both lost Probably Homeless Guy in the clamor. Fake Tourist swears and jogs down the road, checking every alley and street he passes. Jessica snorts. Guess he doesn’t know their friend too well if he thinks he’s gone for good.

She pulls out her phone to check the time and remembers that flash of metal from earlier. Something about it jogs her memory…

‘Metal Wrist Man’ has no results, and ‘Metal Arm Man’ is just full of ads for fancy prosthetics. ‘Metal Arm Super Strength’ on the other hand… bingo. She’s seen some of the footage before, but never bothered digging into the conspiracy boards. This guy has quite a rap sheet if they’re anything to be believed. A street fight with Captain America in which they chuck around cars like toy trucks, whole legions of cops obliterated with either laser or guns coming out of his metal arm, and directly blowing up both the Triskelion and something called a helicarrier using just one helicopter. Obviously half of this stuff isn’t true (that helicarrier in particular seems pretty fanciful; it’s probably just a photoshopped aircraft carrier), but he’s definitely involved in some shady shit, and she can corroborate the super strength and metal arm at the very least.

So he’s some sort of weird modern Inspector Gadget. And dangerous, apparently. Guess that explains Fake Tourist’s gun.

Except, it doesn’t really. Why would only the one guy come after him? Something doesn’t add up. There should be a whole group of suits, some unit of the military, and/or Captain America himself walking down that street. Not one random guy without any support or discernible plan trailing him like a lost puppy.

Shit.

She scrambles to turn off the phone screen, sinking deeper into the shadows and freezing in place. Who says it’s just one random guy? Without moving her head she starts scanning other rooftops, windows, and balconies for others she hasn’t noticed yet. Nothing jumps out at her but she stays still for what feels like hours but has probably been less than one by the time Possibly Evil Inspector Gadget finally comes back.

She squints down at him. He doesn’t look like he’s killed anyone in the meantime, but looks can be deceiving. He just seems… lost. Although that description could have easily applied to her mother too, and she definitely didn’t have clean hands. Jessica swallows a few times and forces the image of the ferris wheel out of her head.

Anyway, she’s pretty sure this guy wasn’t actually trying to evade either her or Fake Tourist while he was gone (who’s back as well, accompanied by two other men). He was probably just trying to get across the bridge yet again. Fake Tourist looks personally insulted though, and is stalking closer with his new crew, which is really going to mess with their cover considering there’s literally nobody else on the street right now.

Which is apparently fine by him. He pulls the gun.

Inspector Gadget’s face registers nothing but pure unfiltered terror when the men grab him and Fake Tourist whispers something in his ear. They force him into the alley at gunpoint, his head shaking vehemently and mouth forming protestations all the while. Jessica whips out of her slouch. That didn’t look like the reaction of a dangerous killer and she doesn’t like where this is going. If she couldn’t save Alisa, at least maybe she can help someone else.

—

Shots ring out as she lands and runs toward the alley, interspersed with the smack of fists hitting flesh and a voice speaking in something that sounds vaguely Russian, from what she knows of the language. Another voice is pleading for the others to stop. Her heart pounds as the pleading abruptly cuts off, switching seamlessly to something foreign and emotionless. The first voice snaps at him to speak English.

“Ready to compl—”

Jessica rounds the bend and smashes Fake Tourist’s head from behind in one smooth motion. He drops like a brick. The other two men shout but she sends one of them flying into a wall and the other straight up to the fire escape above, where he slams headfirst into the ladder and falls right back down. Inspector Gadget is standing in the back of the alley with blood running down his shoulder and right side, and a glazed look in his eyes. He’s stopped talking mid-word, and stares at her for a few seconds longer before collapsing in place as though his strings have just been cut. The sentence he hadn’t quite finished tumbles around in Jessica’s head before she recognizes the implication.

“Shit.”

She can see whites all around his eyes and he’s struggling to breathe. She crouches next to him, wiping her hand on her jeans and holding it out appeasingly, casting her mind around for something, anything to help pull him out of the panic.

“Hey, do you remember the name of the street you grew up on?”

 

**The man who used to be the Winter Soldier**

 

There’s a woman crouched before him, lit from behind by a yellow light. The man who used to be the Winter Soldier stares for a second as the question rattles around in his brain. He feels like there should be emotions attached to it. Like it has some sort of importance and he should remember it somehow but he just can’t concentrate. There’s a fog in his brain and he knows he has to go along with orders but it feels like things got twisted around, like something went wrong somehow, and he doesn’t think he wants to do what they want him to. Does he even think? Or want things?

Everything is so fractured. His mind is locked away in that foggy cell and he’s battering at the walls but he can’t get out. The woman is staring at him.

She’s expecting an answer, he belatedly realizes. It wasn’t an order but he knows he needs to cooperate or bad things will happen.

“I.. I don’t know…” But that’s wrong, isn’t it? He does know something. He knows where he’s trying to go, what the street sign says in the dreams he keeps having that he thinks might be memories. He can visualize it right there over the small blond man’s shoulder. “...but I think maybe later it was Love?”

The woman rocks back on her heels. Her pale face seems to lose even more color. She crosses her arms and swallows several times. She might be making facial expressions but he’s distracted by the fog still seeping into his brain from somewhere deep behind his eyes. He screws up his face and pulls at his hair, trying to tug the understanding out of wherever it’s trapped in his head. She came out of nowhere like a force of nature and now all the men are lying in heaps around them. He’s ready to comply but she still isn’t telling him what to do.

He doesn’t like that though, being forced to do things… right?

The fog is starting to thin and he knows he remembers finding out he could like things. His brain gets a little brittle at the thought of losing that. It’s still pushing against the cage in his head and he can barely hear anything over it but she doesn’t listen, flinging another question at him. Why all these questions? Nobody asks him questions.

“What was the name of the next street over?”

He blinks, momentarily forgetting where he is. There’s a map in front of him now, the one from that museum. What does it say?

“Pierrepont.”

What is she planning to use his answers for? Is this still about the man from before? Steve, his mind whispers against the unmovable bars of his brain cell. His name was Steve. It falls limply to the ground where his body already rests. He thinks about giving up and something inside him shatters.

“Hey hey, stay with me. What was the next street, the one after that?”

Everything is so much effort. Complying, not complying, does it really matter? They’ll always be after him.

“I just wanted to get to Brooklyn.”

Hey, that wasn’t compliance.

A laugh bubbles out and she swears, maybe at him he can’t really tell. Social cues are one of those things it apparently helps to have memories to understand.

“They’ll always be after me, even if I don’t comply,” he explains. “They can make me comply. It’s how I kill people. I might even kill you, for what you did to them. You should probably leave now.”

She swears again. He’s pretty sure dames ain’t supposed to swear this much. He tells her that and she rolls her eyes, finally standing up and tugging him with her.

“Alright Loverboy, you clearly can’t handle things on your own. Back to my place.”

She starts walking and he follows, leaning heavily on her shoulder so the spinning alley can’t take him down with it. His brain feels tender, like it’s not sure what to do about snapping into compliance and then losing all direction immediately afterward. The bars holding it in are misty like the fog. Also, he’s been shot. Shots. Like all those times he shot Steve. Stevie. Brooklyn. Maybe he can remember more if he can only get to Brooklyn, even if he’s afraid he’ll get there and not remember anything. He pulls back and stops, swaying.

“But I want to go to Brooklyn.”

She rolls her eyes.

“You can’t even get across the bridge on a normal day, let alone when you’ve been shot and whammied with some weird-ass Russian brainwashing. We’re going to go get you cleaned up, and then we can take you to Brooklyn.”

She seems like she can handle herself which is nice in a dame even though he doesn’t like that she’s not giving him a choice. He’s allowed to dislike things now and that feels kind of refreshing, but one of the things he dislikes is not being able to make his own choices so it doesn’t feel good after all. His brain is starting to feel more solid but he finds he dislikes that too because it’s letting him feel the pain from the bullets. One of them is still inside him and he’s pretty sure that’s not good. She’s talking again.

“That work for you?”

Does what work? The bullet? He’s pretty sure it doesn’t, and he tells her so as the building next to them begins tilting to one side. She dives forward and grabs him, propping him up and making everything go vertical again.

“Yeah that’s pretty clear. Which is why I’m suggesting we go home, fix the bullet, and THEN go to Brooklyn. Is that good?”

He thinks it over for a second. Now that the choice is there he isn’t sure he’s ready to go to Brooklyn just yet. He’s tired anyway. Maybe she’ll have a real bed that she’ll let him sleep in. That would be nice. The people he killed always seemed to sleep so well and he thinks it might have been because of having beds. He nods and she shoulders his arm and reaches around to grab his belt loop on the other side of his waist, starting out of the alley. It almost feels like he’s lighter than air as they walk, but that seems wrong. He’s a lot bigger than her, after all.

“The way I see it, we’ve got two choices after that. We can find some place to disappear or we can lock those pricks away so they’ll never control you again. How many more are there?”

He doesn’t know, but guesses only a handful might still know about the Winter Soldier or his old bases. He remembers the ones from D.C. but the rest are only flashes in his nightmares. Maybe between twenty and sixty? He was frozen for most of it and he doesn’t know when all the memories happened. He knows where some of the chairs were though, and some of the cryo chambers. She stops in place and stares at him for a few seconds after he relays this intel.

“The hell?”

He shrugs.

“Hydra.”

She snorts like that explains it. Maybe it does.

“Figures.”

 


	2. Epilogue

**Bucky Barnes**

 

Jessica’s as strong as him and he’s been training her in hand-to-hand combat over the last several months, so she’s a force to be reckoned with by now. Not that she wasn’t before, it’s just that she can take him out now if it comes down to it, which is a comforting thought for both of them. They have a system where she stays hidden until needed in case someone shows up and starts spouting trigger words, at which point she shows up and takes them down, him down, or both, if necessary. The part where it’s him she has to fight is almost nonexistent at this point.

At first they’d discussed having Bucky be the sniper just in case she couldn’t get to him in time, but he found he liked being the one to storm the base. It’s different than what they used to have him do, plus he’s noticed that the more times they try to use the triggers and get interrupted by Jess, the less effect they start having on him. He can fight them off for longer and longer each time while she does her thing.

Also, neither of them liked the idea of someone getting the jump on him and then making him snipe her, especially before he got better at fighting the triggers off.

Anyway, Bucky is pretty glad they’ve developed that system. It gives them time to figure out how to react to unexpected situations like the one staring down the muzzle of his gun. He waits a good thirty seconds before rolling his eyes and speaking up, because it’s clear that Steve can’t handle shit.

“Well if it isn’t Captain Goddamn America. We wondered when you’d catch up to us. Who’s the birdboy here?”

That at least elicits a watery smile.

“This is my soulmate, Sam. Remember how you used to tell me I wouldn’t die young because I had a soulmate out there to find?”

Bucky remembers. He also remembers trying to convince himself he’d make it through Azzano for the same reason, and never actually believing it. Steve hadn’t ever really believed him either. They both knew they were destined to die young.

And here they were, seventy years later.

He reaches a hand out and Sam lands to shake it.

“So who’s ‘us?’”

Bucky smirks in response as Jessica’s voice rings out from behind the others. “I’m assuming I won’t need to use this, Spangles, but just in case, both of you keep your hands where I can see them.”

“Steve, meet my soulmate, Jessica. You owe me about a million dollars for being right, by the way. In the meantime, are you gonna help us blow this place to hell or what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve: "Wait a minute, that bet was for like two dollars!"  
> Bucky: "Inflation."


End file.
